A trial will be underway next month to determine if children exposed to mercury four years ago at a Franklin Township day care require health monitoring and which party will bear the cost.

Oct. 12 starts the arguments on both sides of the case regarding Kiddie Kollege, a former Station Avenue thermometer factory-turned day care center.

Some 100 children were found to be exposed to high levels of mercury there in 2006. Attorneys representing the children and their families will present arguments and experts which support a plan that requires health monitoring for the children.

It’s up to Superior Court Judge James E. Rafferty to decide if the monitoring is warranted and who will foot the bill.

The township, county, and state, could be held liable as well as day care center operators and the real estate company that sold the contaminated property.

“It’s really outrageous and really kind of sad to watch all the finger pointing,” said James Petitt, lead counsel heading the five-law firm force defending the children. “There are 100 children contaminated with mercury, and it’s just incredible to me that nobody is stepping up to the plate for this.”

The attorneys on the children’s side of the class-action lawsuit are proposing 10 hours per year of health testing that would decrease in frequency over time. The monitoring would track the children’s levels of mercury and their symptoms of the toxic exposure.

The medical information would be stored in a database and could be accessed by parents and doctors.

A multi-million dollar court-supervised fund — paid into my the parties Rafferty deems responsible — would pay for the monitoring and data entry, but it would only be paid as the funds were used, Pettit said.

On the other side of the argument, lawyers say the children exposed to the toxins have not shown any symptoms of mercury poisoning in the four years since Kiddie Kollege was closed.

“The township’s position is that there is no legal liability on behalf of the township for what occurred at Kiddie Kollege,” said James Maley Jr., attorney representing Franklin Township. “We need to present the case in front of the judge.”

Calls were not returned by attorneys for the state and county on Friday.

The day care center was formerly the site of the thermometer factory Accutherm, which went bankrupt before Jim Sullivan III, a Franklin Township real estate agent, bought the building. Sullivan bought the foreclosed plot, then sold the property which later became the site of the contaminated day care.

The state Department of Environmental Protection razed the building on the site in January, and the steel and cinder-block debris was hauled away to an Indiana hazardous waste site.

The $700,000 site remediation was covered by the DEP’s public-funded remediation program while litigation continues to sort out who owns clear title to the property. The ruling will determine who should pay the clean-up costs.

There is one matter in the case all parties do agree on — the trial’s location.

Attorneys on both sides have been in litigation in Woodbury for four years, but the presiding judge could change the locale to Bridgeton, according to Pettit.